Jerry Kon has created a feather plugin for Maya called jcFeather designed to create feathers in Maya that allows you to create and shape individual features and can use Renderman RiCurves for rendering using Renderman or 3Delight and looks rather extensive for its price of $99.00 USD – jcFeather for Maya looks to come as a free version download as well for try-out.
Check out jcFeather for Maya in action here.
jcFeather is a plug-in for Autodesk Maya. It was designed to create feathers for creatures such as birds , eagles and so on. It includes shaping an individual feather, creating a feather coat and finally rendering them with Renderman RiCurves. Details will be discussed later on. In this feather workflow, you need shape an individual feather first, then contribute it to a feather system to create a feather coat. A feather system may need more than one single feather to simulate a complex feather coat.